The Great Game (17 page)

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Authors: Lavie Tidhar

Tags: #Fantasy

BOOK: The Great Game
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  "They think of me as the crazy old lady who lives in the ruined mansion," Miss Havisham said cheerfully. "Which helps. And there are enough alarms outside to warn me of anyone approaching. You never know, in our line of work."
  "Quite," Lucy agreed. She watched Miss Havisham place a kettle over the fire and busy herself making tea. "How long has it been?" she asked.
  She could feel Miss Havisham tense. "Who can remember," she said, quietly.
  The post-eighty-eight fall-out.
  The reason she was there.
  But first, the tea.
  They sat and sipped their drink and watched the sea outside the windows.
Miss Havisham is to be handled delicately
, she remembered the fat man saying, once.
Agents are replaceable, but archivists like her only come once in a lifetime.
  "How is Mycroft?" Miss Havisham said, as though reading her mind.
  "Oh, very well," Lucy said, carefully. "He sends his regards."
  "Good old Mycroft," Miss Havisham said. "What happened wasn't his fault. It was before your time, though, wasn't it, Westenra?"
  "Yes. Mycroft…" She hesitated, picking her words carefully. "He sent me for a chat. We need… Some old material has recently come up. Routine. He thought you might be able to help."
  "You know I could," Miss Havisham said. "The question is, should I?"
  But Lucy knew Miss Havisham, the way she knew herself. For they were all operatives, all playing the Great Game. And once you played, you were never out. Only death put you out of the Great Game. What had someone said, long ago? She had heard the words from one of her instructors in the secret compound at Ham Common…
When everyone is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before.
  And so she waited, and sipped her tea, and didn't speak. And at last, the way she knew she would, Miss Havisham said, almost reluctantly it seemed, and yet unable not to say it, "What, exactly, has come up, Westenra?"
  And still Lucy prevaricated; still she waited; until Miss Havisham, perhaps recognising in herself the need to speak, to delve into the past, to play, once more, the game, said, with the ghost of a smile and a sharp, yet almost fond, tone, "Well, Westenra?" Then Lucy began to speak; and even then she idled, she went around the subject; she took her own time.
  "
Sonnets from the Portuguese,"
she said, and waited, and watched Miss Havisham, whose head rose, and she looked out of the window with a far-distant look in her eyes.
  "Elizabeth Barrett Browning…" she said. "Yes…"
  Lucy waited, patient.
  "A small, innocent volume of verse…" Miss Havisham said. Her voice had acquired a dreamy, sing-song attribute. "Oh, yes… it was to be placed with great ceremony on board the Martian probe. The ceremony took place in Richmond Park. It was dusk; Moriarty was there, he was Prime Minister at the time, yes, wasn't he, love? And the Prince Consort was there, and that old rascal Harry Flashman. All of London society, it seemed, had turned out for the event. Irene Adler, too, though she was but an inspector in those days. And the boy, of course… he came, too, but too late to save her."
  Lucy waited, her heart beating faster. She was not supposed to know these things, she knew. But Miss Havisham was beyond rules and restrictions, now, and recollection for her was an act of living, like drawing breath or drinking water. Once started, she would not stop.
  "We had watched the boy, hadn't we, love?" Miss Havisham murmured. Who was she talking to? Lucy wondered, recalling, somewhat uneasily, the rumours at the Bureau. Havisham and Mycroft, they had whispered.
  "We watched him, ever so carefully. He was a handsome boy. Orphan. Less a name than a title. And he had a girl, he was in love. Her name, too, was Lucy. Did you know that?"
  Lucy hadn't. But Miss Havisham was not stopping to check her reaction. She was speaking
through
Lucy, speaking to the fat man who had left her here, in this crumbling mansion, in Satis.
  "A marine biologist. She worked with the whales in the Thames… Did you know they had followed Les Lézards here, on their voyage from Caliban's Island? We had wondered at the connection between them. Could the royal lizards somehow communicate with the whales? Were they their eyes and ears in the ocean? We could never prove anything… Some knowledge was beyond even us."
  "Tell me about Lucy," Lucy said, patient, probing. "Tell me about the
Sonnets
."
  "It was dusk and, before the spectators, the airship loomed. It was to carry the probe away with it, at the end of the ceremony. All the way to Caliban's Island, there to be launched into space. A big, dignified ceremony and the girl, Lucy, there to place, into the probe, ceremoniously, two objects. An Edison record filled with whale song… and that slim volume of poetry,
Sonnets from the Portuguese
."
  Miss Havisham fell silent. Motes of dust danced in the sunlight coming through the window. "Books…" she said, so softly Lucy almost didn't hear her. "They had always been his choice. His little folly, we called it. The Bookman."
  "The Bookman," Lucy said.
  "Yes. For as the girl came to place the objects into the open belly of the probe, there was a terrible explosion. She died, instantly. The probe was destroyed. Unbeknown to us, it had been a dummy. The real probe was already on the island, prepared to launch…"
  "You said there was a boy," Lucy said. She felt shaken. The explosion had been public knowledge, naturally – it would have been impossible to keep it quiet – but Miss Havisham spoke of it as if she had lived through it, though always one step removed.
  "Orphan, yes. He tried to save her. Couldn't, of course. Which launched the whole sad affair."
  "Tell me."
  "Oh, it was one of Mycroft's less successful affairs," Miss Havisham said, with a small smile. "The boy was obviously being manipulated. His father was a Vespuccian, you know. And his mother, as we found out too late, could have been queen, if we still had human royalty."
  "Excuse me?"
  "When Les Lézards deposed the old, human monarchy, they didn't kill them," Miss Havisham said. "They transported them to Caliban's Island and bred them there. I am not sure why. I am not sure even they knew."
  "And his mother–"
  "Yes. She escaped – we suspected the Bookman's involvement, at the time. She was killed shortly after giving birth to the boy. Colonel Sebastian Moran, if you recall the name."
  "'Tiger Jack' Moran?" Lucy said.
  Miss Havisham nodded. "He worked for Moriarty," she said. "Never mind. The point is the boy's heritage was meaningless. The empire was on the brink of revolution, a lizard queen was bad enough, a human king would not have made things better."
  "What happened to him?"
  "He went to the island. He came back. We lost him in Oxford. There had been an explosion, deep under the Bodleian Library. The boy survived. So did a girl who called herself Lucy…"
  "She was
alive
?"
  "It was a mess," Miss Havisham said. "You see, we had suspected for some time that the Bookman was not exactly human. That he – it – was a product of lizardine technology, an artefact that had survived their crash on Earth. The theory was that he had been their librarian, of sorts. A servant. A machine for making copies of living things."
  
A library of minds.
  Lucy's own mind shied away from the thought. That creature she saw below the Lizardine Museum.
There had been an explosion
, Miss Havisham had said. Lucy said, "What happened to the Bookman?"
  Miss Havisham smiled dreamily. "That was the big question, wasn't it," she said. "He died, of course. In the explosion. But…"
  "Yes?"
  "Wouldn't a machine that made copies of beings," said Miss Havisham, "first of all make a few extra copies of
itself
?"
 
 
 
 
 
 
PART III
The Two Deaths of Harry Houdini
 
 
TWENTY-TWO
 
 
 
The young man who stood, some nights earlier, on the other side of the planet, at the docks of the Long Island, in the territory of the Lenape, was himself contemplating the oddity of replication. There was something miraculous, he thought, in the act of human sexuality, in the way man and woman could get together to produce a new being, an entirely new, alien, mysterious life. An avid reader of the scientific papers – not to mention the somewhat less scientific, yet far more enthralling, tales of scientific romance –
romans scientifiques
, to give them their better known name – he had been fascinated, too, by the idea that it may be possible to produce identical copies of living human beings – even of dead ones, when it came to that.
  The nineteenth century may be drawing to a close, he thought, yet what a century it had been! The greatest minds of many generations had seemed to erupt, all at once, across the world, to further humanity's understanding of the universe it had, somewhat reluctantly, occupied. Babbage! Freud! Jekyll! Frankenstein! Darwin! Moreau! The great Houdin, in Paris, AKA the Toymaker, from whom the boy Weiss had taken his professional name, which was Houdini. Scientists of the mind, of the body, of the laws of nature and the laws of history!
  And yet, he reflected ruefully, his knowledge – actual, concrete knowledge – of asexual human replication was greater than most, having had cause, as it were, to experience the unpleasant thing at first hand.
  But first, a concise history. The boy was in the nature of going over facts, summaries, all a part of his rather rigorous training.
  Well then.
 
  Code name: Houdini. Birth name: Erich Weiss.
  Place of birth: Budapest, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
  Father: Mayer Samuel Weiss, a rabbi. Mother: Cecelia Weiss, née Steiner. Family: five brothers, one sister.
  Recruited to the "Cabinet Noir" in 1890, at the tender age of sixteen.
  Specialities: escapes, disguises, locks of any kind. Recruited by: Winnetou White-Feather, of the Apache.
  Assignments: the boy was sent to the World's Vespuccian Exposition, in the city called Shikaakwa, or Chicagoland, during the ninety-three affair. He had been only an observer at the time.
  Notes: the boy is a promising young agent – his recruiter, Winnetou, speaks highly of him. His cover as a travelling-show magician is promising, and his skills in the art of escapology remarkable indeed. Young, handsome and personable, the only concern is due to a blank period two years after the White City Affair, when the boy went to spend a summer on the island of Roanoke…
 
  Harry – he preferred Harry to Erich, had been using the name more and more now, until only his family still called him by his birth name – paced the docks. He waited for a ship but the ship was long in coming. He was leaving Vespuccia, that magnificent continent, his adoptive home, leaving behind him the tribes and the new cities, the vast open plains and a sky that seemed never to end, under which one could sleep, in the open air, as peaceful as a child…
  He was nervous, excited. He was being entrusted with a great mission. After a tour of the continent earlier on, when he went from encampment to encampment and town to town, performing his magic show, under the moniker
The Master of Mystery!
he was now ready for a new challenge. He was leaving Vespuccia, for the first time–
  Had been summoned to the Council of Chiefs one day, weeks before, at the Black Hills, the Mo'ohta-vo'honnaeva in the language of the Cheyenne. Arriving late one night, with a silver moon shining over the hills like a watching eye, Houdini was met by his old mentor. "Winnetou," he had said, hugging him. The Apache warrior hugged him back, then said, gruffly, "You took your time."
  "I came as soon as I received the summons," Harry said, without rancour. "And as fast."
  "Come with me," Winnetou said.
  Harry followed the other man into the camp. The Council was not often convened in full. The chiefs of the Nations met at different places, at different times. It was a very different form of rule, Harry thought, then the one in Europe, with its rigid monarchies and obsolete blood-lines. The Nations had welcomed the refugees from that continent, those who did not wish to live under lizardine rule, but there was no debate over who, exactly, was in charge. Yet the Council was troubled. There was the ever-present threat of the Lizardine Empire, while Chung Kuo, the Middle Kingdom, had recently showed dangerous signs that it was considering expansion for the first time in centuries. While on their own doorstep, so to speak, the Aztecs waited, in their strange pyramids and with their own designs on the land…
  Harry was taken to the circle of the Council. President Sitting-Bull, smoking a pipe, looked older than he had in ninety-three, the last time Harry had seen him.
  And all the major nations were represented that night. He saw familiar faces, old generals: Sioux and Cheyenne and Cherokee, Apache and Arapahoe and Navajo, Delaware and Shoshone, Mohawks and Iroquois and others, all sitting under the great silver moon, all turning to watch him as he came.
  "The young magician," someone said. Someone else laughed. Harry felt his cheeks turn hot. He didn't let it bother him. Instead he smiled. "You wished to see me," he said.
  "Cocky."
  "Youth always is."
  "Sit him down, Winnetou."
  Without ceremony, Winnetou pressed Harry on the shoulder, pushing him down. He sat, cross-legged, before the chiefs. A great fire was burning, down to coals, on the ground, and the smoke rose, white like a flag, into the air.

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